MinIO AIStor: The Unified Data Foundation for the NVIDIA AI Factory

The NVIDIA AI Factory delivers a full-stack blueprint for industrializing enterprise AI, but end-to-end throughput across that stack depends on a data plane engineered to match it. This white paper explains how MinIO AIStor fills that role across four pipeline stages. For training, RDMA-enabled data paths and strict S3 consistency sustain high-throughput multimodal data access. For RAG pipelines, AIStor serves as the durable system of record anchoring the document-to-embedding-to-index loop. For lakehouse architecture, AIStor's native Iceberg catalog embeds table metadata directly in the storage platform, eliminating separate catalog services and failure domains, while AIStor Views publishes curated datasets as queryable data products without data movement. For inference, AIStor is designed for BlueField-4 DPU integration to offload KV cache management, and provides an S3 plugin for NVIDIA NIXL enabling multi-tenant KV cache tiering across inference runtimes. Performance benchmarks and architecture diagrams are included.